Singapore’s total trade continue to decline in second quarter

Singapore's total trade continued its decline in the second quarter
of 2013, contracting by 2 percent following the previous quarter's 9
percent decrease on a year-on-year basis.

The
level of total trade reached 247 billion SGD in the period, higher than
the previous quarter’s achievement of 230 billion SGD but down by 2
percent in comparison with the same period last year. The decrease can
be attributed to the 10.8 percent decline in oil trade.

Also according to data released on Aug. 12 by the government trade
promotion agency International Enterprise Singapore (IE), non-oil
domestic export (NODX) declined by 4.9 per cent in Q2 2013, on lower
shipments of both electronic (down 11.5 percent) and non-electronic
(down 1.4 per cent).

The first half of 2013
saw continued year-on-year declines of both total trade and NODX. Total
trade dropped by 5.5 percent year-on-year while NODX contracted by 8.8
percent in the same period.

In view of the
poor performance of both total trade and NODX in the first half, the
projections for both total trade and NODX in 2013 are both downgraded to
between 2.0 and 3.0 percent and between 0.0 and 1.0 percent,
respectively.-VNA